25.11.1999

‘Trotskyist’ incoherence

British-Irish debate

The ‘Statement on British-Irish’, signed by Gerry Downing, Chris Edwards, John Stone and Dave Brown, has almost a comical quality, insofar as it constitutes some kind of appeal to the members of the CPGB not to go down the road to eternal damnation by embracing a programme that accurately reflects the political reality of the communal divisions in Ireland (Weekly Worker November 18).

The authors counterpose their own semi-nationalist version of Trotskyism, which they seem to believe reflects some kind of authoritative revolutionary tradition. Yet, far from even producing a coherent argument against Jack Conrad, the authors have merely produced a set of theses that contains many howling absurdities, that assumes much that remains to be proven, and contains arguments that contradict each other so flagrantly that it is difficult to imagine how the authors can advocate them while keeping a straight face. But that would be to underestimate the crystallised confusion of the various strands of middle-of-the-road ‘Trotskyism’ that the individuals concerned come from.

Nevertheless, it is good to hear the comrades’ arguments, in the interests of furthering political debate and programmatic struggle, and it is worth taking up their theses point by point.

Thesis 1 The comrades assert that “Lenin only fought for the right of self-determination of oppressed nations”. A flagrant nonsense, that implies that Lenin was indifferent to the national rights of the peoples of every imperialist country. Any honest reading of Lenin’s writings on the nature of the first imperialist war will reveal that Lenin’s critique of the social-patriotic actions of the social democrats was not based on the view that the nations whose bourgeoisies were now imperialist had no rights, but rather that their wars, in the concrete in this epoch, were aimed at the oppression of other nations. Therefore any legitimate national questions that arose for such peoples as the French or Germans, which taken in isolation would be legitimate, concretely were inevitably subsumed under the imperialist, predatory character of the war.

To assert that Lenin took the view that only peoples who were not in any way oppressors had rights is sheer nonsense - on the contrary, a good part of Lenin’s critique of imperialism was based on its denial of those rights to the overwhelming majority of humanity, a critique that was based on the denial of equality, that presupposed as a matter of course that all nations had the same rights, including the right to self-determination. The peculiar assertion of the comrades that “Lenin did not defend the rights of oppressor non-nations to self-determination” implicitly concedes this. So what about oppressor nations, comrades?

Obviously, Leninism, they implicitly concede, defended the rights of all nations. So the argument immediately shifts to whether peoples who do not constitute fully developed nations have rights as peoples. The assertion that they do not would rule out any national rights for a whole range of peoples whom the Bolsheviks verifiably granted national rights to, including many of the undeveloped peoples of central Asia, who at the time of the revolution had barely developed the rudiments of a national consciousness.

Thesis 2 “Northern Ireland or the loyalist community is not a nation, but a part of the Irish nation. Supporting the right of self-determination of the Irish people as a whole is incompatible with supporting the right of secession of its pro-UK population.” This is not an argument, but simply assumes what has to be proved. The comrades tell the protestant population that they are part of the Irish nation, irrespective of their own views on the subject, and assert that anyone who dissents is violating the rights of the majority of the Irish people. Such a method is outrageous, and a form of national chauvinism. If I were to use this method, I could assert that the Welsh people are part of the ‘English’ nation, and equally assert that anyone who declares otherwise is violating the right of the English people as a whole to self-determination. But such an argument would be dismissed with contempt by any democrat, and rightly so. There is no reason to be more charitable to the same arguments when they come out of the mouths of those who claim to speak for the currently oppressed.

Thesis 3 is ridiculous, as it equates the demand for self-determination for areas with an overwhelmingly dominant majority of British-Irish with the demand for the rights of the white American slavocracy to exploit black slaves in the name of self-determination. What an absurd comparison.

In fact, what the comrades do not say is that in the 1930s, their hero, Leon Trotsky, advocated that the US southern black population, in areas they were overwhelmingly dominant, should have the right to separate from the white population and form their own state in the black belt. It goes without saying that, in the event of such a separation being realised, it would not only be the black population that would have exercised self-determination, but the white population outside the black state’s putative borders would also have had their ‘own’ state, and thereby in a sense would have exercised ‘self-determination’. In fact, Trotsky was acting on mistaken facts in this instance, as the black population was in reality so dispersed throughout America as to make such a separation utopian.

The vast bulk of the comrades’ remaining examples consist of situations in which in their view there was a fundamental difference of social system between one state and another: West Germany v East Germany, North Korea v South Korea, North Vietnam v South Vietnam, China v Taiwan, etc. The comrades seem to have somehow slipped into implying that the Irish republic of Bertie Ahern is some kind of workers’ state, and that the Protestants are in some way equivalent to various counterrevolutionary holdouts against putative social revolutions. The use of such analogies only reveals the comrades’ confusion and lack of understanding of elementary differences between the class nature of states, as well as their utter incomprehension of the national question.

Thesis 4 “The demand for self-determination for Ulster unionists does not have any support and it is wrong to try to impose it in Ireland. The best way of winning unionist workers to our side is through a programme of revolutionary socialist transformation.” Since the comrades apparently believe that the desire of Ulster protestants to live in a separate state from the Irish Republic “does not have any support”, then, taking their analogy with West and East Germany a little further, they could perhaps assert that the protestants are only prevented from leaping over some sort of metaphysical ‘Berlin Wall’, and thus emigrating to Eire, by the sinister machinations and coercion of British imperialism. Such a view would be pretty hallucinogenic, but it is in fact only the ultimate logic of another variation of imperialist economism. The need to address the real and existing communal divisions cannot be wished away by “a programme of revolutionary socialist transformation”, which is ironic, given the comrades’ ultra-rejectionist green nationalist standpoint. It sounds like the kind of argument you might hear from the Socialist Party. Common methodologies make strange bedfellows, even when the programmatic impulses differ.

Thesis 5 “It is ridiculous to expect a republic to allow a part of its own nation to be ruled by a foreign monarchy under a segregationist regime that oppressed, harassed and ghettoised the oppressed people, those who favour a one-nation republic.” This passage falsely assumes that in the event of this option being realistically offered to the British-Irish by a revolutionary movement in Ireland, the whole status quo as it exists today would be unshaken in the rest of these islands. A ridiculous, sterile view of social struggle and dynamics. But behind this is a profoundly pessimistic view, which basically assumes that the protestant people are irremediably reactionary, and that, even in the face of a militant determination of the currently oppressed to ensure there is no reversal of the terms of oppression, the protestants will remain completely unshakeable in their monarchism and anti-catholic bigotry. With such a view of the possibility of any change in the consciousness of this layer of the proletariat, there is indeed nothing else to do but to drive them into the Irish Sea (which is the only logical conclusion one can draw from the comrades’ arguments).

Thesis 6 The comrades register with shock that

“Lenin advocated self-determination as the best way to remove national obstacles preventing working class unity. If the workers of the oppressor nation defended the right of the oppressed nation to secede, it would build bridges with the workers of the oppressed nation. The new CPGB position would mean asking anti-imperialists and Irish republicans to become the champions of the loyalist right to have their own state.”

Yes, comrades, Lenin defended the right to secede. Secession means the separation of territories where different peoples are dominant, in order to defuse national antagonisms and facilitate a later voluntary unity of the same peoples. It is the signatories of this statement who do not defend the right to secede, indeed they positively advocate as a virtue the involuntary unity of two peoples, by the simple device of denying that they are two peoples. This is not defending the right to secede, and there is no way that the involuntary unification of such peoples can ever defuse national antagonisms. The fact that secession would give a distinct territory to a currently oppressor people is often implicit. But the idea that in this case the Protestants might have a small fragment to call their own offends the Irish nationalist sensibilities of the comrades.

Thesis 7 The comrades assert that the secession of any part of the holy island of Ireland to provide a protestant state under any circumstances would mean the death of working class unity and massive pogroms, etc. This only underlines their pessimism about the possibility of winning this people to working class politics. With such a view, one can only envisage driving such an irredeemably reactionary people out of the ‘oppressed’ territory altogether.

Thesis 8 The comrades generalise their New Left, semi-Stalinist position on the national question by attacking those who refused to back the bloodthirsty Argentinean dictatorship’s diversionary 1982 seizure of the Falklands/Malvinas (a territory that had no Argentinean population) as being “defenders of imperialism”. This only signifies that they are simply disarmed before ‘revolutionary’ forms of class collaboration with the ‘anti-imperialist’ bourgeoisie. In this way they reflect the influence of third world bourgeois nationalism, and show their political susceptibility to the phenomena that led to the overtly nationalist and reformist positions of the Latin American Stalinists and Morenoite ‘Trotskyists’ in backing various of these reactionary regimes, from Peron to Videla to Galtieri.

Thesis 9 hardly stands up as worth responding to on its own, simply repeating earlier points, but thesis 10makes the ‘shocking’ point that the CPGB believes that the Irish question can be resolved without a proletarian revolution: “The CPGB is not proposing to achieve Irish national self-determination through a socialist revolution and a workers’ republic. They seek a pure bourgeois democratic solution without fundamentally challenging capitalism in a futile attempt to convince unionists that they would be better off in a bourgeois ‘binational’ federal Irish republic.”

The comrades’ ultimatum that any solution to the national question must be under a ‘socialist’ republic is another piece of imperialist economism. In other words, again, a methodology fundamentally the same as the Socialist Party. It sits very uneasily with their recognition (in thesis 6) that the national question is an obstacle to working class unity, and hence to revolution. If the national question is an obstacle to revolution, then in order for a revolution to take place, the national question must be solved, at least as much as is possible under capitalism, otherwise the ‘obstacle’ remains in place and the revolution will not happen.

This is not ‘stageism’, but elementary Leninism, and only proves that the comrades’ tailing of the nationalism of the oppressed gives rise to similar methodological flaws - primarily economism - as those who more straightforwardly tail after the nationalism and chauvinism of British social democracy. Notwithstanding the different specifics, what they are both capitulating to is an aspect of the status quo, and hence despite superficial differences a common method can be discerned.

Thesis 11 shows that the comrades, for all their self-proclaimed sagacity, have no consistent or logical approach to the national question at all. They simply put a minus where the imperialists put a plus at any given time. Thus their pro-Serb apologias over Kosova, with their attempt to somehow equate the CPGB’s position on Kosova with their position on the British-Irish.

In reality our positions on these two questions, in complementary ways, show that we consistently defend the democratic rights of all peoples, whether at any given time they are in favour or out of favour with the imperialists. All the comrades’ ‘principles’, of allegedly defending the rights of oppressed majorities, go out of the window with their position on Kosova, of defending the right of the Serbian overlords to rule Kosova against the will of the overwhelming majority of its overwhelmingly Albanian population, just because the imperialists hypocritically took up the Kosovar cause. Thus these ‘revolutionary democrats’ (don’t laugh!) end up giving ‘military, not political’ support to the Serbian equivalents of the Shankhill Butchers and UVF in Kosova, with their ‘national’ legends of Prince Lazar and the Serbian wars of the 14th century that closely resemble the orange mythology around William of Orange and the 17th century - ‘historical’ justifications for systematic oppression in the contemporary world.

Of course the CPGB opposes and condemns the brutal reprisals against the Serb minority (and indeed other minorities, such as the Roma) that have been perpetrated by Albanian nationalists since the war. Though if comrades Downing and co were consistent in their position on the national question, in defending the rights of an oppressed majority to suppress the entire ‘oppressor’ population, then they should be applauding the actions of the Albanian nationalists against the Kosovar Serbs, and recommending it to Irish republicans as the way to deal with the British-Irish ‘oppressors’. But the comrades’ knee-jerk ‘anti-imperialism’ takes precedence over any consistency, even in their claim to always side with the oppressed against the oppressor - to the extent of effectively applauding the chauvinism of almost anyone, oppressor or oppressed, who claims to be against imperialism.

As for the assertion that the current Russian bombing of Chechnya is simply an imitation of the western bombing of Serbia, and the Russia bourgeoisie is being ‘encouraged’ to imitate the imperialists by the western triumph, one wonders who the comrades thought the Yeltsin regime was imitating in its previous, 1994-6, war against Chechnya? The real point being that Russian nationalists do not have to look westwards to gain ‘inspiration’ for such acts of chauvinist barbarity - the history of tsarism, and indeed of Stalinism, provides ample ‘inspiration’ for such things. And of course, Russia’s smaller imitators, such as the Serb ultra-nationalists, in turn gain and give inspiration in such brutal matters as with Kosova. This attempt to make an amalgam between communist defenders of Kosovar rights, the imperialists, and the Yeltsin regime is pretty desperate.

Thesis 12 The obligatory ‘orthodox’ appeal to all the workers of all nationalities to unite and form a socialist federation, is completely abstract and simply contradicts all the reasoning in the preceding theses. Taken together with its classically economistic counterposition of socialism to democratic demands, this is not consistent democracy, comrades. This is a shambles.

Ian Donovan